How Help Scout uses Support-Driven Growth to increase retention.

Mariah Hay

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VP of Product

of

Help Scout
EP
97
Mariah Hay
Mariah Hay

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Mariah Hay, VP of Product at Help Scout

In this episode, Mariah shares the product principles she lives by, and the importance of having a cross-functional group of teams working towards outcomes with an aligned goal to avoid building a Frankenstein product.

We also discussed how Help Scout’s product team uses OKR’s, what Support Driven Growth is and how you can implement it, and we dove deep into Product Specialists at Help Scout, who they are, what they do, and the role they play in the support team.


Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

The product principles Mariah lives by. 00:02:05
How Mariah structures her groups of teams around outcomes to avoid building Frankenstein products. 00:03:57
How Help Scout uses OKR to help its teams plan the outcomes they’ll be working towards. 00:06:06
The how and why to Support Driven Growth. 00:12:39
Product Specialists at Help Scout, who they are and what they do. 00:20:60
What Mariah would do to help a company turn its churn rate around. 00:28:33
The one thing Mariah wished she knew about churn and retention when she first started out in her career. 00:31:59

Transcription

Andrew Michael: [00:00:00] Hey, Mariah. Welcome to the show.

Mariah Hey: [00:00:02] Hey, thanks for having me.

Andrew Michael: [00:00:03] It's a pleasure for the listeners. Mariah's the VP of product at Help Scout and all in one customer service platform that helps you balance everything your customers need to be happy prior to Help Scout Mariah was the SVP head of practices at Pluralsight, where she led engineering, product management, product design, data science, machine learning, and industrial design with a functional leisure team that helps support 11 business units and 50 plus teams, both product in a lean secure flow, efficient human centered way.

So my first question for you, Mariah is what are the product principles that you live by?

Mariah Hey: [00:00:37] So I. I firmly am rooted in human centered design practice. Um, I started my career out as a physical product designer, industrial design as my background, although I didn't do that for very long. I got into digital products soon thereafter, but the things that I took away from that, that you learn as a physical product designer, um, when you're designing a physical product, you care [00:01:00] about the environment somebody is using it in.

Physically how they interact with it and their, their size and shape, um, and usability, and those principles carry through very nicely into thinking about how you construct digital products. Um, what is the use case? What is the true problem you're trying to solve? Um, and then how you construct something that's useful, usable and delightful.

And so that's been the common thread throughout my career. And the thing that I care the most about as a professional.

Andrew Michael: [00:01:29] Yeah, I love that. Actually, one of our previous guests, Angela Tayga, um, she worked at, I think it was an architect prior to becoming a product designer, which is now the director of product design, I think at Facebook.

And, uh, one of the questions you got posed, like. To work for a software company was like, how would you like to build a building that could house like a billion people? I think there was a question and she was like, there's no way I'm ever going to build a building that big, but I can build a software product that big.

And that's sort of what interested and intrigued her to make that switch from like the physical [00:02:00] world into the digital. Uh, but always find it interesting sort of how the two worlds crossover so much and how you can draw parallels between, uh, anything like, sort of in the physical realm with the digital, when it comes to design and product.

Mariah Hey: [00:02:13] Yeah, they sure do.

Andrew Michael: [00:02:15] So I'm also interested, like I mentioned, at the beginning, you led, uh, quite a big, diverse, uh, team  at Pluralsight. And one of the things I'm interested in, like how do you align your product teams to ensure that you're not building a Frankenstein product?

Mariah Hey: [00:02:29] Yeah, that's a great question.

So it looks a little different depending on how large your company is. I think that I always start as a leader by making sure that the individual pods of people that are working on discovering user problems are cross-functional in nature. So whether you're a company of 10, a hundred, You know, a thousand, a hundred thousand, you, it, the nucleus of the people that have to work together day in and day out to solve problems has to be correct.

And if you [00:03:00] start with that correct architecture for me, what that normally looks like, um, is like a product manager, product designer, a handful of engineers. And then depending on what they're working on, they might have something special like an AI specialist. Um, but if you can really enable them to be close to the customer, Then the problem becomes, depending on the scale of the company, how do you organize groups of teams around outcomes?

They're trying to go solve for the customers. So it doesn't turn into a Frankenstein product. And that really lies at having a cross-functional leadership team who is really focused on the strategy. Defining those outcomes, creating those guardrails, coordinating across those teams and having a clear line of sight into how those outcomes are actually going to pull levers for the business, whether they're financial levers or levers of, uh, retention or avoiding churn, um, and getting very clear on those.

And I find that if you don't have a leadership team that is able to do that, that's where you start to get these. [00:04:00] The silos within the companies and these Frankenstein products where one part of the product doesn't really feel like it's part of the other part of the product, because it's actually a people problem where you've got leaders that aren't connecting those teams.

Andrew Michael: [00:04:13] Yeah, I liked that sort of, it all comes back down to the alignment. And I think one of the things you mentioned was like having teams focused and work around outcomes. Um, maybe talk us through that a little bit 10, what that looks like maybe now, like since joining, uh, Help Scouts, like how have you sort of brought the learnings from Pluralsight in to help Scott now trying to get teams to move towards outcomes and what are some outcomes?

Yeah.

Mariah Hey: [00:04:38] That's one of the first things, um, I wanted to try to do, as I came into Help Scout, uh, when I started at Help Scout, about eight months ago, they were about a a hundred person company. And about half the company was your R and D function. I like to call it the experience organization.

And those are those, all of those pods that I was talking about, those little cross-functional teams. And right now we've [00:05:00] got about nine of them. And, um, You know, Nick, uh, Francis, who is our co-founder and CEO. One of the reasons why I Help Scout's been so successful is because he has been the one who has been very close to the customers and trying to understand what their problems are, their pain points and what outcomes do we need to create for the customer?

Like what does the product need to do in order to achieve X, Y, and Z for the customer? And we're kind of moving in the company has gotten so large to the point that, you know, It makes sense to take those great activities that Nick was doing around being close to the customer and really installing them on those cross-functional teams.

Um, when I showed up there really wasn't a product management function, um, across all the teams. And in my mind, product managers are also qualitative and quantitative researchers who are intensely curious, uh, about the customer, the problem space, and. Is a facilitator to [00:06:00] engage the designer and the engineers, and really uncovering what those, those problems are.

So they can decide, you know, if this is, if X is the problem, then why is the outcome? Like if we see this outcome happening for the customer, we know we've solved their problems. Now in order to be able to do that, there are a variety of tools out there. I think every consultant probably has their own model.

I personally kind of go to OKR objectives and key results as a mechanism for planning as a company and helping teams understand, you know, what are the, the outcomes we're trying to create. And so I use OKR is in a way where. Um, each of the experienced teams, those little pods cross-functional pods of folks I was talking about earlier.

Um, every quarter we go through an exercise, um, at the end of the quarter where they're planning for the next quarter, where they talk about what is the outcome of the objective, but they write it like an outcome, like by the end of this quarter, [00:07:00] you know, a user should be able to do. Um, should be able to accomplish X, Y, and Z task.

It's not talking about the thing you're going to go build. It's talking about what the thing your build building is going to do for the customer. And then the key results that are associated with those are if we see these behaviors happening or these metrics moving, we know we will have achieved that outcome for.

The customer, and this really helps the team stop thinking about, Oh, we have this laundry list of things to ship, which they do underneath those things, the outcomes and key results. They can then go and figure out, well, what is the best way? What are the things we need to ship? What are the questions we haven't answered that we need to go employ qualitative or quantitative research in order to get these questions answered so we can select.

You know, the path of least resistance to create that delightful, usable, useful experience for the customer. And that's why I always try to anchor on outcomes because it [00:08:00] really helps teams create ownership and autonomy and not just ship a list of things that somebody else is telling them to ship.

Andrew Michael: [00:08:07] Yeah, I love that as well, because it's actually a very, very similar approach to what we did at Hotjar where I was previously working.

Um, we used, okay. I was as well, and one of the things that we were working towards, cause I hit it up business intelligence. There was getting to the point where we could have each team understand the outcome and see how that influenced all the chaos throughout the company. So ultimately fell into one of three buckets where we are the head.

Um, one was retention. Um, the other one was monetization and the other was acquisition and you could sort of position every team, every squad within the company towards an outcome that had an influence to one of those metrics and they had their own key metric, uh, trickling down. And it became a sort of a really powerful, motivating factor in the sense that it gave clarity for everyone to understand, like if they improved this input, this was going to be the output.

And this is how it [00:09:00] went up and cascaded almost like a tree, uh, up to the final black company. Objective. Um, and definitely we sort of saw like a big, uh, swing in terms of the momentum that we had as a team in the alignments, like, eh, and just overall, just the product speed that we were able to deliver improved drastically without chaos.

I think like when you mentioned as well, just reminded me of a couple of books on the topic and I think the one was measuring what matters. And then I think correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't bill Campbell who sort of introduced OKR in the beginning.

Mariah Hey: [00:09:35] I'm not sure I know the whole history of, of where it came from,

Andrew Michael: [00:09:38] but yeah, because bill Campbell, I think it might've been him, but one of the books I read as well was called a trillion dollar coach.

And he's just an amazing story of this guy, bill Campbell, who was a coach to like pretty much every one of the top Silicon Valley. Um, CEOs or leaders within teams, like at some point, I think he was mentoring [00:10:00] Steve jobs, um, Zuckerberg, uh, like Larry Page. I pretty much everybody at somebody has a really, really interesting story.

I'd highly recommend reading it if you haven't. So shifting gears as well. Now a little bit to, to the context of churn and retention. And one of the things that we tried to briefly before the show, but one of the things I remember seeing and I found really intriguing and interesting from Help Scout was this idea of support driven growth, um, where you could actually use your support team as a growth center to, to drive adoption for product and.

That's the premise behind it, basically. It was that when customers reached out to you, um, it was a really good opportunity to interact with them, to teach them about product features that they might not have used or new use cases they could use within the organization. So I'm interested sort of now since joining the company, like, have you sort of seen this at play within Help Scout and [00:11:00] then maybe just a following question is like, How do you see support as a function when it comes to helping improve the customer experience overall, which ultimately will help increase retention for customers?

Mariah Hey: [00:11:11] Yeah, . You know, they're kind of two schools of thoughts out there and companies in approaching support teams or service teams. Um, one school of thought with companies is, Oh, it's just a cost center. The goal is to get through as many tickets as quickly as possible and spend as little money as possible on our support team.

And you've seen companies. Do things in order to try to accomplish that goal, particularly when they get very large enterprise scale and even, you know, that being the first thing that was really offshored. When you looked at companies that started to take a global approach to staffing. Um, because of the costs of, of having humans cause support.

Ultimately we're not in a place where we have computers that are smart enough that can replace support folks. Um, and I think that it will be like that for quite a long time. There will [00:12:00] always be support things that require the human touch. So if that's the first camp of thought, you've got a second camp and that really you don't take advantage of, um, support driven growth in that.

Um, and it actually ends up being kind of a negative experience for your customers. Uh, because it, it doesn't feel like it is an opportunity to develop the relationship with a customer or, or help teach them like what you were mentioning, um, which would ultimately reduce churn. Um, the second school of thought, which is the school of thought that HelpScout subscribes to.

And most of our customers believe in, and we really help teach people about. Is how can you use an opportunity of any touchpoint with a customer current customer, which typically comes in through support. Especially if you're a small, medium business or even a small enterprise, uh, in order to nurture that relationship with them, because when customers experience your product, um, and your company, they don't [00:13:00] think, Oh, well this is an experience with a product.

And this is an experience with support and they're different parts of the companies and functions. It is just a singular relationship with a company. And so just like we try to make our products. As effective and useful as possible. You want to do the same thing with support teams. And the magical thing about support teams is they are actual humans and there's nothing like a human to human contact to really help bond and create trust between a company and their brand and their product and everything, and the person that they're serving and as consuming it.

Um, so the thing that we try to espouse and help. Our customers do is create that lasting relationship. And even it's funny, Nick, our CEO and I has spent the last quarter, um, doing interviews with, with our customers, different groups of different kinds of customers that buy our product to really understand what is their philosophy on how they want [00:14:00] their customers to experience, uh, support.

Um, interaction. And I would say that the majority of them are like, we want our customers to feel like we care about them and they're special to us and we want to do everything we can to support them. And so if you subscribing to that second school of thought, you can really start to look at how do you then build your playbook in order to create support, support, driven growth.

What are the different things that. The support folks can do that, go above and beyond just answering the question. Um, how might you help coach your support team to suggest additional things or be kind of a partner and problem solver? Um, alongside the customer, of course it's, if you do that, um, the customer is a better experience, but you have to kind of get away from metrics, like time to close a ticket.

Um, Your metrics have to reflect the way of thinking philosophically about [00:15:00] customers being satisfied, which isn't necessarily like how quickly can we like get through things or, um, how cheaply can we do it? It's all about how happy can we make the customer? How much more can we enrich the relationship, um, with them, which ultimately in my opinion, because I'm a human centered designer, like I mentioned earlier in the call, the second one I think is much more effective.

Andrew Michael: [00:15:24] Absolutely. And I think as well, it's such a wasted opportunity when you think about it within the first approach, because you spend so much money trying to reach customers, you like send out email marketing, marketing automation, and the majority of it gets lost, but then you actually have an opportunity to interact one to one with the customer.

And it just goes down the drain in the sense, like you try to get rid of it as fast as possible, try and resolve the issue. But on the opposite end, you're spending so much time and effort trying to actually have those interactions. And then when you do have them, you know, Taking advantage of them. So that's actually why I love the whole concept.

I also really loved the point that you mentioned, uh, [00:16:00] now as well about the concept of a product and, and your customer's relationship with their product and their whole experience, because this is one of like my beliefs now as well, like starting a new company again, is that. The company is the product.

Uh, and every touch point that a customer has with it is just a part of it. So for example, like marketing itself, you can think of that as, maybe as the packaging that goes around the product that they're going to open. And then, uh, like the product itself might be the physical good inside the box, but then there's all sorts of things behind it that go into it.

The instructions manual that comes with it as your support center and your, your docs. And I like this way of thinking in this inset. You want to create this amazing experience for your customers that feels an X the same end to end. So from the very first ad they see to maybe the time that they're churning or, uh, they're expanding their accounts.

Uh, how do you see that now as well? Going into Help Scout, uh, have you sort of, is this something you're trying to work towards, get this cohesive [00:17:00] experience throughout the company?

Mariah Hey: [00:17:01] Oh, absolutely. This has been something that has been very important to the company throughout the history of the company.

And I, I think that one thing I've really enjoyed is that there is that awareness from every single leader in the company that we together as a team create this end to end experience for our customer. And this allows us to acknowledge and work very closely to align not only our metrics and goals, um, but also be aware of.

What it looks like when a customer experiences, a piece of marketing or, um, a feature with inside the product or when they reach out to our customer support team. And I would encourage other leadership teams as well. So really look at, are you aware of. What that end to end experience looks like from the time that a customer encounters your brand till the time that they decide that it's not, um, a product they want to use anymore, every single experience along the way, um, [00:18:00] should be, you should look and evaluate and scrutinize and agonize over the quality of that.

Um, and I think that by doing that, uh, it can help you be that better partner and ultimately really impact the success of the business.

Andrew Michael: [00:18:14] Yeah, because I think from what I've seen as well at other companies is that it almost feels like product is the God in a way. And like the product, when I mentioned product now, it's actually the software, the piece of software that gets sold and.

This sort of creates a culture, like a bad culture within the company, I think as well in the sense that, uh, it's treated as the most important thing, then what does it mean for everybody else? Working in other parts of the company sort of is that second grade to the actual product itself. But when you think about like retaining customers, every step of the journey has an impact on net retention.

And if. You're building a subscription business. Your goal is to retain customers. Otherwise you don't have subscriptions or a business. Uh, so treating it's like a such, I think as well, [00:19:00] in my opinion is a mistake. Uh, it really needs to be that cohesive experience where everybody's driving to deliver that amazing experience throughout.

Mariah Hey: [00:19:08] Um, so. Talking about that then as well, like we touched a little bit on, uh, support driven growth. Uh, I'm interested as well now. And in your experience as well in the past, like as a product leader, how do you feel and see that support themselves can have a role and play have an impact on the actual product tickets delivered to customers?

. Um, one of the things I've really enjoyed about joining Help Scout is. Because Help Scout provides a customer support platform. You can tell, we really believe in customer support. So our team is equally robust, our customer support team and the way it's been built out and thoughtfully crafted to create relationships with the customers.

It doesn't S doesn't end there. It also has been created in a way to create relationships with product, with [00:20:00] sales, with marketing, and within our CTO, we call our customer support team. Org our C team within our C team, there is a group called product specialists and product specialists are actually incredibly knowledgeable customer support folks who have very deep knowledge in particular areas and parts of the product.

And they kind of field some of the most wicked questions. They help the customer support team. Um, elevate their support quality, but they also, um, are kind of assigned to each of the product teams. And so by aligning a product specialist with each of the product teams, the product manager now has this person that they partner very closely with, um, so that they can understand, uh, volume of requests.

Coming in for specific features or problems that are showing up for customers or even things that customers really love so that we can double down on them. And so by creating that [00:21:00] bridge between product and customer support, um, you kind of bring. A whole new pair of eyes and ears to the product team.

So they're not blind to what is happening with current customers, um, in a way that you is kind of statistically significant of your customer base. I think one of the mistakes that product teams do is they kind of start yeah. And end with their own qualitative and quantitative research for their discovery methodology.

But they don't actually do a great job of leveraging that support team to gather that knowledge because there, the company might not be set up that way. There might not be those roles there. I think there's also that exists with, um, Being siloed away from sales teams as well. When you start to look at win-loss metrics and in turn metrics from them, um, which is more important, I think for large enterprises where it's mostly B2B sales and most of the sales, um, get [00:22:00] supported by account management, but in a company like Help Scout where we're really serving small and medium business.

Most of that great data is coming in through the support team constantly. So that's how we solve it. And I've, I've really enjoyed. Being able to rely on that partnership

with them.

Andrew Michael: [00:22:16] I love that. So correct me if I'm you call them product specialists then and do, so this would be a typical support who's handling support on a day to day basis.

Like how would they then interact with the product team itself? Would they be involved in some of the product teams or squads meetings? Like how do they get put or do they get pulled in when there's something new being looked at or is it like really part of their role to actively be a part of their team, the product team as well?

Mariah Hey: [00:22:42] That's a great question. They kind of have a foot in each world. Of course they have the C team that they're working very closely with, but on the flip side, and you could see them doing things like attending the weekly standup or planning meeting with the team, um, being in the Slack channels with the [00:23:00] team, having one-on-ones with the product manager and even some of our product specialists, as we brought on product managers.

That do, um, more qualitative and quantitative research, even having them participate, um, in those conversations when we're doing that outreach and work with our customer. So they're not only seeing what's coming in through, um, through the C team, but they're also seeing what the product team is hearing.

So they kind of have that three 60 view of, of what the customer, the. The prioritization is going to be, as we tackle, defining what features are going to be built and when, um, which has been really great to have, have them want to do that and stand up and do that. Um, and it's funny because I I've even had conversations with, um, the leader for that group.

And we've started to identify certain similarities between product specialists and maybe it is a segue into product management later in their career as well. Or even account management on the [00:24:00] sales team. So not only is this a position that is really crucial for the company, but it also can be an interesting stepping stone as people navigate their careers, um, through technology companies and deciding what parts of the business they want to work in as individuals.

Andrew Michael: [00:24:16] Yeah. As you were explaining the role, like it sort of in my mind had a natural progression to potentially even be a product manager. Um, so the, the other thing then as well as. What sort of percentage of the support team would be made up of these product specialists versus like, um, full on full time, support

Mariah Hey: [00:24:36] How we align a percentage is. Probably more dependent upon how many experienced teams exist, um, and how many they can handle cognitively. So right now I believe we've got, so we've got nine cross-functional experience teams. Four of them are heavily, um, Heavily customer product [00:25:00] building teams. The other ones are more like enablement teams that build technical architecture that enable the other teams.

And so what my commendation would be as if you were looking at your organization, taking a product specialist and maybe. Giving them one or two teams that they're aligned with that they can really go deep on as far as like heavily feature user facing things. Um, right now that's kind of what our balances, um, I think in a perfect world, people always, I don't know.

I think if you've got somebody that's really capable, like they can handle two, I think three, you start to divide, uh, the cognitive there's like too much to pay attention to. So you can't go as deep as a. An individual, but if you're fairly senior, um, product specialists, you can probably handle two teams or two different areas of features.

And if you're newer to the role, maybe you would just want to start out with one. And so that's how I would probably proportion, uh, a team [00:26:00] like that.

Andrew Michael: [00:26:01] Nice. I love this because like you said, as well in the beginning, like the support is the front line and more often than not like product managers, miss out the opportunity to actually spend the time to speak to them.

But having it as like an official role where it's the product specialist is actually joining different meetings within product. As you said, joining you in like the, uh, analysis and customer research, uh, components. I think it's, it's, it's a really, really strong bridge then. That allows you to get that extra perspective and make sure that you're leveraging the insights coming from across the organization.

Um, I, I see where you're running a little bit short on time now, somewhere. I want to ask you one question that I ask every guest that joins the show. Um, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. And you joined a new company and you arrive and turn, our attention is not doing great at this company. Um, the CEO comes to and says, Mariah, we need to turn things around.

Uh, I want to put you in charge of it. We have 90 days to [00:27:00] try and attend some results in what would you want to do with your time?

Mariah Hey: [00:27:05] The first thing I would want to do is be able to understand. Where that turn is happening at and what is influencing it. And at what point, so I would probably immediately understand like the data that the company has an is tracking, um, If, and it depends on the company.

Let's pretend it is a B to C company like, like Netflix, where myself as an individual customer, I can choose to sign up or I can choose to leave at any time. And it's not Netflix. Wasn't crucial to me doing my job. It's very opt in and opt out and there's, you know, Competitors I can go to, I would probably get eyes on the eight week retention curve of not only the product overall or customers turning overall, but also looking at the different parts of the product.

Um, So I'm trying to think [00:28:00] of, of Netflix. They it's really, they don't have multiple product parts, but if they had like a couple of different things that people may or may not use heavily understand the eight week retention curve of, you know, somebody subscribes to the platform they use. A part of the, like product, a part of the platform.

And then they abandon it after, you know, six weeks, seven weeks. And then you can really start to understand the patterns of where your, your leaks are and your bucket. And then you go talk to those people that have turned and you do your qualitative to figure out why, why are they leaving? Like why did they abandon this?

What was it not doing? Um, and so that's just in the, in the product, but you can also so have issues that are happening, um, which are price related or customer support. And so, yeah, it's, I start with the product, do that qualitative and quantitative. Um, and then see if there are leaks, leaks, other places, I would probably want to collaborate [00:29:00] with a product leader with them leaders and other parts of the.

Organization. See what sales is seeing for win loss. Um, see what customer support is seeing as far as like complaints coming in, like, um, it's usually when it comes to product, it's either like the features aren't meeting the needs, but you can also have major performance issues, load times, for example, uh, that people are reporting and just aren't getting handled.

So it could be underlying technical infrastructure. And I think within, so if my. You know, the CEO's like, Hey, you've got 90 days to do this. If I can't wrap my hand around, like, The quantitative data within the first 30 days, like that is a huge problem, that those metrics aren't set up. Um, and I would do that first and then look at the patterns and then go do the qualitative and talk to people and find out the why.

Found that the line. So looking at the Watson, the Y uh, then it's obviously natural for you to gravitate [00:30:00] towards, I think, uh, sitting in your role. Um, but yeah, you mentioned quite a few different areas and sort of just highlighted again, obviously the premise of the show, but how much, how many different things can actually impact the final metrics.

So it really comes down to figuring out what it is first. It has like the biggest opportunity, uh, to tackle. So. And last question I want to ask then as well, is what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started out with your career?

Oh, that's a tough one.

What is one thing that I know know about turning retention that I wish I knew earlier in my career?

You know, I think that I used to have the attitude that. Good products sell themselves. And I know now that is not true. Um, bringing awareness to the fact that a product exists in the first place [00:31:00] and then being able to not only good products sell themselves, but you also have to have that cusp that very close knit customer relationship.

And so when you're thinking about customer support, It's not enough to just have a great product. All of your touch points need to be lined up. And if you fail on a touchpoint and support, um, you're going to fail ultimately with the customer because it starts to undermine their trust. No matter how good your product is.

So. I would encourage people earlier in their career that really are in product to pull their head up and look around and really understand the levers that the other parts of the company do and have to do in order for the company to be holistically successful.

Absolutely am. And I think as all, it's probably also just the fact that people have just become a lot more demanding, um, with the products and services that they use, like maybe 10 years ago.

Uh, you're happy with a piece of software that just worked, but today you expect amazing experience because of the [00:32:00] competition because of what's out there. Uh, you really need to be thinking about all these aspects in order to really succeed and do well in the market today. Well, Mariah, I mean, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today.

Is there any final thoughts that you want to leave the listeners with? Uh, how can they keep up to speed with your work or.

Absolutely. Well, feel free. I'm not super active on Twitter, but you can always reach me on Twitter at Mariah. Hey, um, if you Google me, there are some things that I personally care about within the technology field.

Uh, one of which is kind of our ethical responsibility as people that create these offerings for millions of people and impact their lives. Um, so you'll be able to find some of the talks and stuff that I do online, and I would challenge everybody that's in our field to really. Think about where your ethical boundaries are and the ethical boundaries that are of your team before you encounter the hard situations of making decisions, um, ethical ones that impact your business and your customers.

[00:33:00] Um, if you don't do that, we get ourselves into trouble and as technology gets better and better and smarter and smarter, it's up to us to be the guardians of how we impact people's lives. Um, nobody will be able to do that, but us.

Andrew Michael: [00:33:14] Absolutely. And it's obviously it's becoming more and more important day after day as more people go in line and, uh, the different services are impacting our lives on a daily basis.

Well, my it's been a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining and I wish you best of luck now in 2021.

Mariah Hey: [00:33:30] Thank you so much. And thanks for having me.

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Mariah Hay
Mariah Hay
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The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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